9 minute read
BOLT
Moving forward
DELIVERING VALUE PROPOSITION TO CUSTOMERS AND DRIVERS: MICAH KENNETH, REGIONAL MANAGER, BOLT EAST AFRICA
BY ELLY AKOKO
second entrant to the Kenyan on-
Ademand ride hailing market, Estonian mobility company Bolt is no stranger to stiff competition having successfully taken on first to market brand Uber in countless cities across Europe. Micah Kenneth, the Regional Manager Bolt at East Africa reveals to CEO Business Africa that the secret behind their success is focus on the two people that matter: their customers and driver partners. “We have focused our value proposition to customers and drivers and that’s the secret behind our significant market share and getting to become the leading ride hailing in platform in Kenya, both by geographical distance and extent of our service.”
Bolt knows that without the drivers, its quest to succeed in Kenya would have proved futile. It’s the sole reason why their needs have been at the center of any decision that the company has made since 2017 when it first set up shop in the country’s capital Nairobi. “We took time when we launched in the market to engage with drivers.”
Bolt has never moved away from that policy even after recording success in the East African nation. “We have a continuous feedback loop; every trip
has a rating and drivers’ ability to reach us through our customer support lines. Using all these feedbacks from customer roundtables, from the ratings, we get to know the key things and propositions they care for.”
Just like many other entrepreneurs, the top concern among many drivers is how much revenue they generate from their daily operations. Bolt works to ensure each driver gets adequately compensated for the amount of work put in. “We focus a lot on the earnings per hour and we reiterate on bringing in more demand, shorten the inconveniences or the costs they incur to offer services in our platform and focusing on the earnings they take home, locking them in and valuing the gig opportunity therein,” Micah explains. This strategy has proved immensely successful, particularly in attracting and retaining new driver partners. Presently, Bolt has over 50,000 active partners including couriers and drivers on their platform across major cities in Kenya.
CONVENIENT, SUSTAINABLE MOVING
In a city like Nairobi where finding car parking can be a nightmare, Bolt exists to ensure customers can conveniently get to their workplace without having to worry where to park their car. That convenience extends to city dwellers keen on avoiding the large overhead cost of car ownership and associated maintenance charges. All these people can be assured of getting a car at the click of a button. “We are creating a platform where it is easy to find a car or motorbike with very short arrival times and affordable prices.”
Apart enhancing convenience, Micah notes that Bolt also helps build sustainable cities in East Africa by providing a sustainable, affordable and safe urban mobility solutions for every use case that a private car would provide. “We want to replace the use of private cars in urban centers and that in itself has a massive impact on the environment because you end up with fewer cars on the road, less parking spaces.” With the need of parking reduced, Micah says the large areas of concrete and tarmac that have been the dedicated for parking can be converted into recreational areas with trees and lots of greenery.
Still on the greenery subject, Bolt has partnered with Seed Balls for 11 million indigenous tree seedlings for distribution and propagation in degraded areas - former forest areas or grassland areas that cannot naturally be expected to regenerate. It goes further than that. The company also has a green category on its ride hailing that caters to customers who wish to have a net zero transport footprint. “We also launched our Bolt Green category which has 100% electric and hybrid cars forming slightly under 5% of the trips done in our cities.” Micah is glad that it’s an option customer are choosing though waiting times are slightly longer as the vehicles are few and the charging infrastructure is still limited.
CUSTOMER SAFETY COMES FIRST
According to Micah, safety is one of the top pillars the platform is built on and they have dedicated significant resources to make it a safe platform to use in a sustainable way in urban areas. “Safety is what we build our platform around, we have several partnerships to guarantee safety during a trip. It begins with our onboarding of drivers; we do background check on them. Similarly, we have continuous platform rating for every trip and get live feedback post trip from passengers about their experience with a particular driver or even a driver giving us an experience with a particular passenger,” he explains.
One of the revolutionary things Bolt has done is to have an API integration - live on trip integration with on demand services like ambulances and security response
company. “At the press of a button and within a very short time, you have an immediate response from either an ambulance team if it is a medical case or a fast response security team if its an emergency situation.”
NAVIGATING COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Ride hailing was one of the most affected businesses during the covid-19 pandemic as movement was highly restricted with most offices closing down and requiring employees to work remotely. Even schools were either closed or learning happened virtually. Bolt certainly took a revenue beating but managed to come out of the pandemic stronger than it was before.
To survive in what was now referred to a new normal, Micah tells us that the company innovated to meet what the customers really looking for in a new normal. “During lockdowns, curfews, we had medical teams across the country moving during odd hours so we did innovate and create a solution for them in collaboration with government.” The innovation revolved around delivering fast and reliable ride hailing services to essential and emergency service provides who needed mobility but do not have private cars during those curfew hours where movement was greatly restricted.
Opportunity also arose around food delivery. “We launched Bolt Food in Kenya because we realized a lot of people were staying at home and couldn’t go out to their favorite restaurants.” Micah believes no other time was better to enter this market than during Covid as the revenues collected from this new venture “more than made up for the reduced mobility.”
The pandemic also taught Micah and his team one great lesson, Frugality. “Biggest learning is that frugality will take you out of any economic crisis much stronger so building a resilient business where you keep your costs affordable and low makes the business very resilient and adaptable,” he says. DRIVER CENTRIC RIDE HAILING PLATFORM
Drivers have been a key pillar of Bolt’s success story and mobility firms actively looks out for opportunities to improve their welfare. With the global rally of fuel prices, Bolt has been actively seeking ways to cushion its drivers from adverse impacts of higher pump prices. “Fuel forms about 20 to 23% of drivers monthly costs so an increase in taxes have a direct impact on their take home earning so every price adjustment on fuel, Bolt reviews their pricing as well,” Micah reveals. “We have several components in our prices - there's a per minute rate, per kilometer rate and minimum charge. We make optimizations on each of those, especially on the price per kilometer rate to adjust for the increase in cost of providing that service,” says Micah.
To cushion the drivers further, Bolt East Africa has signed a partnership with Rubis Energy where the oil marketing company offers Kshs 4 discount per liter for drivers on Uber platform whenever they fuel at any Rubis outlet within Kenya using their Ruby's card. The discount, according to Micah, is a significant amount of money in terms of savings when you look at it from the perspective of how much liters an active driver consumes on the platform.
“We are also active in vehicle financing engagements on how we can scale and ramp up electric cars because as the cost of fuel per liter is increasing, the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour is not increasing as rapidly; there's quite a material difference in terms of cost per kilometer on an electric car and internal combustion engine car.”
CREATING A FORMIDABLE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK
Regulation can either be a bulwark for success or an impediment to growth of any sector depending on how its crafted and implemented. Ride hailing having largely
preceded regulation, sector players have always been wary of regulation. The same is not true for the Estonian based company. “Bolt has always taken a pro regulation approach in the more than 400 cities they operate serving over 100 million customers in a month.”
With a huge experience and wealth of knowledge in the industry, Kenneth says that they are willing to share that with every legislative body in the 45 countries where they have a presence. “I call them collaboration opportunities with governments to create a formidable regulatory framework; what was once new is now becoming a norm because of the convenience it brought and can now be regulated in a way takes care of the interests of the entire marketplace,” he adds.
Kenneth says that governments have taken an interest in terms of the rate of commission that is being charged by platforms and they are happy to see the government being inclusive in getting their views and including them within the body of regulatory framework. RIDING TO A PROMISING FUTURE
Despite the significant investment in Kenya and East Africa region, Bolt’s footprint is still a scratch on the surface compared to the number of cities across the region that are still underserved. Greater opportunities to expand into new towns continues to exist particularly in Kenya where devolution has really skyrocketed the growth of towns like Lodwar and Turkana towns which are hundreds of kilometers away from the capital Nairobi.
Bolt has been positioning itself to grab these new opportunities that continue to unfold in the East African market. In July 2022, the ride-hailing company announced that it was opening a regional hub in Kenya that will serve as a host for top managers running operations in Africa. “Kenya has been favored because it is a great investment destination to house the teams that take care of different verticals within the business. It also complements other governments where we have focus - Southern Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania and this creates a lot of collaborations,” Micah reveals.
As streets get crowded and sound from ringing climate change bells continue to become louder, Kenneth urges users to make Bolt their preferred mode of transport. “With every use of Bolt, you are reducing the use of private cars in our cities which creates less traffic, less parking space pressures and hopefully some of the large parking lots we have because of private cars could be converted back into recreational centers for a greener, cleaner Nairobi.”
